


Out of the Frying Pan

by Untherius



Series: Co-Sovereignty [1]
Category: Emberverse - S. M. Stirling, Howl Series - Diana Wynne Jones, Tangled (2010)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-14
Updated: 2012-02-13
Packaged: 2017-10-31 03:52:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/339586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Untherius/pseuds/Untherius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Many, many, many...nay, a GREAT many...years have passed since Rapunzel and Eugene ascended the thrones of Corona.  Rapunzel's past catches up with her when a mysterious, yet strangely familiar phenomenon plunges the world into a new Dark Age.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I reassigned the Change to 2012 both as a nod to the Mayan calendar and to maintain temporal consistency with "Northward-bound."

Lake Rosario, near Trevelin, Argentina  
21.00 hours, March 17, 2012

Eugene stood on his balcony, hands on the wrought-iron railing, gazing northward. He was lost in thought. It wasn't that he was a particularly introspective man...or, rather, he didn't used to be. Nor did he used to be the nostalgic type either, he mused. Sure, there was a time when there wasn't anything about which to _be_ nostalgic. His first twenty-five years had been, in his opinion, eminently forgettable as only the life of an orphan-turned-thief would be. That had all changed in the most dramatic way the day he'd met Rapunzel and nothing had been the same, or even remotely normal, since then.

Many—particularly his in-laws and his own parents--had told him that his memories would become blurred, muted and all but swallowed by the tides of the years. They were wrong. Some things blurred together and became fuzzy, but then always snapped back into sharp focus whenever he thought about them. While his memories remained strong, the pain of certain events were mercifully dulled. Perhaps emotional pain was something else the sun-tears healed. He was eternally glad of not having to re-live the deaths of Rapunzel's parents, or his own, or some of his progeny who'd gotten themselves killed doing things Eugene wished he could forget. He wouldn't care to again see his children and grandchildren suffer as they watched their spouses grow old and die while they themselves remained young and virile. It was nearly as hard seeing Rapunzel watch her little sister age and eventually pass for her grandmother. Nor would he want to re-live their exodus from Corona as it fell before the Prussian army. Their subsequent wandering over the globe had been...interesting, but still replete with its own hardships.

Rapunzel still looked the same as she had the day he'd returned her to her parents. She often still acted like she was eighteen. It did his heart good, but he could see in her eyes the toll all those years had taken on her spirit. He thanked God...or whomever it was people tried to call the Supreme Deity...that she was so endlessly resilient.

Their surviving children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren could all pass for one another's siblings. He loved every one of them dearly, yet they made him ever-mindful that they represented something outside of the natural order. On the other hand, maybe human beings really were supposed to be that way, that the Fall of Man really had doomed humanity to the cruel ravages of aging, death and decay. Human beings...he'd lost track of the number of discussions they'd all had that revolved around the question of whether or not they were really human and the matter remained unsettled.

He wondered when he'd become nostalgic. Clearly, four centuries of marriage were enough to change a man. For that matter, four decades, or four years, would have been plenty, especially when one was married to someone like Rapunzel. Truth be told, it was probably a combination of four centuries of marriage and four centuries of life...four hundred years of watching the world change around him while he himself remained more-or-less mired in the seventeenth century. He was certain that, had he not had people to love and who truly loved him in return, and had he not understood the true curse of what may as well be immortality, he'd have become just as bitter, cynical, and hard-hearted as Madrona Gothel had.

He heard footsteps behind him, the soft pad of bare feet on the still-warm tile. It could have been any of several members of the family. His wife, three of their children, five of their grandchildren, two of their great-grandchildren and one of their great-great-grandchildren were life-long bare-footers.

He turned and looked across the large patio. It was big enough to be its own floor and it nearly was. They'd designed their house by committee. Eugene had initially believed that to be a bad idea and had said so even before they moved to Argentina fifty years ago. He'd been proven wrong, owing in part to all they'd learned from their previous habitations around the world, and in part to the fact that his son Thorin and granddaughter Eva were architectural geniuses. The final product would have intimidated Frank Lloyd Wright.

The structure was built into—or rather carved out of--the northern end of a low spur ridge overlooking Lake Rosario. With nearly thirty in the household, and every one of them a sun-bearer, every bedroom needed a predominantly east-facing window. Even with sub-families rooming together, that still meant a good half-dozen large bedrooms in addition to kitchen, living and dining rooms, workshop space, and food storage--all of which had to be much larger than they would in most houses. Fortunately, they had the volume of an entire mountain at their disposal. It allowed nearly unlimited space, even with the required exterior wall of windows and enough sky-lights to choke a llama.

Building space was of particular importance for the cavernous root cellar needed to store the mind-boggling amount of food consumed by more than two dozen firewalkers and for the space needed to prepare much of it for storage—canning, drying, and so forth. There were several enormous cisterns, each the volume of an Olympic swimming pool, catching and holding rainwater and snow-melt from the mountain above.

The expansive patio on which Eugene stood had been carved out of a rock bench below the rest of the house and most of its doors opened onto it. It was surrounded by a sturdy wrought-iron railing hand-forged by the entire family. Rapunzel had painstakingly carved a large sun into its surface. Various containers—large ceramic pots, rectangular stone and hypertufa troughs--were artfully arranged and planted with dwarf conifers, bonsai specimens, and alpine and small dryland plants from around the world. During summertime, most of the family practically lived on it, rather than inside the house.

They'd built the entire complex more or less by hand, which had been a considerable feat, one further complicated by the fact that only Eugene could use power tools. His wife and all of their progeny generated powerful electromagnetic fields which fried anything electronic, including electric tools and even most gasoline-powered ones. It was just as well that bringing electrical lines to their home-site had been problematic. Initially, they'd set up a steam-powered compressor to run a few pneumatic tools—masonry drills and saws, jackhammers and tampers. The compressor was later hooked to an electric generator, which allowed Eugene to operate some limited computer and audio-visual equipment—which the rest of the family had to give a wide berth--and the special EM-shielded electric lighting he'd installed. Otherwise, everyone...except Eugene...tapped into their sun-blood and used it to weld metal to metal, stone to stone, metal to stone, and even glass to glass in some cases.

A young-looking woman with long brown hair strolled up to Eugene. Sophia, Eugene and Rapunzel's eldest, looked as much like her mother as Rapunzel looked like her own. Sometimes Eugene still mistook the one for the other when he was tired, or seeing them in his peripheral vision, or not paying attention, or when the light was low like it was now.

Eugene smiled.

“Good evening, Daddy,” said Sophia as she stepped up to him.

Eugene hugged his daughter and kissed her on the forehead.

“Are we ever going to be too old for that?” she asked.

“Never,” he said simply.

“Am I ever going to find a man like you?”

Eugene sighed pensively. “Sunflower, three hundred years ago, I'd have said yes. But considering how much life I've lived...we've lived...no, I'm afraid there isn't anyone like me in the whole world.”

“That's a pity.” She turned and looked out at the waxing moon hanging high overhead. “Surely there's still one hidden tower we haven't searched.”

Eugene chuckled. “You hold out hope for some neglected princeling who's not all stuck up on himself, do you?”

“A girl can dream, can't she?”

“Indeed she can,” came a very similar voice from behind them.

They turned as Rapunzel stepped up to them. Eugene hugged and kissed her.

“I was just coming out to tell you dessert should be ready in a half-hour,” she said.

“Be careful, Mama,” said Sophia, “Daddy's in one of his moods again.”

Rapunzel looked at her daughter, tittered lightly, then looked back at Eugene. “Oh, is he, now?” Rapunzel wrapped her arms around her husband's neck and gazed deeply into his eyes. “Well, I think I can  
pull him out of whatever melancholy he thinks he's feeling,” she said as she wiggled up against him and drew a smile from Eugene.

Sophia rolled her eyes. “I...think I'll go inside and see if anyone needs help.” She turned and strolled off across the patio.

She met her grandson Karl at the door to the living area. “I wouldn't go out there if I were you,” she said. “They're at it again.”

Karl rolled his eyes. “Again? You mean they actually stop?”

Sophie giggled in slight embarrassment and looked back at her parents. “They're glowing already,” she said with a roll of the eyes, then sighed. “Oh, how I miss having someone to make me glow,” she said wistfully.

“Seriously, Grandmother, I'm rather surprised our family isn't at least twice the size it is.” He cleared his throat, then gestured toward the living room. “You should come look at this. There's something odd happening on the evening news. They...” He nodded toward his great-grandparents. “...should come see it too.”

“Mama, Papa?” called Sophia. They looked up. “Karl says there's something on the news we all really should see.”

“We'll be right there,” said Eugene.

*****

A dozen and a half members of the Fitzherbert family stood in the living room watching a newscast on a large flat-screen television mounted on the wall. It was tuned to a CNN reporter in New York City.

“As you can see,” said the woman on the screen, pointing to something that looked like a wave of lightning behind her, “the disturbance is moving fast and...” The image fuzzed out and was replaced with a CNN logo. The logo gave way to an anchor in a CNN news room.

“We appear to have lost the signal from New York. We're trying to restore the feed from Philadelphia as well. Meanwhile, let's go to Jane Harris here in Washington.”

The imaged changed again to show a woman standing on the National Mall, the Washington monument behind her. The white glow of what seemed to be the same electrical disturbance was becoming visible to the northeast. People within camera frame were clearly growing agitated. Harris babbled some of the same things the New York reporter had been saying, which really amounted to not much at all. The Fitzherberts watched the glow increase, approach, then the image fuzzed out to be replaced once again by the CNN logo, which was in turn replaced by another anchor in another CNN news room.

Eugene's family looked at each other nervously.

“Nuclear war?” said Eugene's first son Thorin.

“Oh, I hope not,” said Eugene as he stepped over to a laptop computer on a nearby table. He leaned down and started typing Google search parameters. After a few minutes, he looked up. “I have good news and bad news,” he said. The camera trained on the TV news reporter was now apparently in Atlanta. “The good news is that I can find no evidence of any nuclear launches anywhere, nor is the disturbance at all congruent with a nuclear detonation. The bad news is that whatever it is, it's hit Newfoundland, Montreal, Quebec, Bermuda, Detroit and it's showing no sign of stopping. It's also unclear if it's destroying anything, or just acting like an EMP wave. Whatever it is, it's definitely _not_ nuclear.”

“Then what _is_ it?” asked Sophia.

“I have no idea. Just a minute.” He tapped on the keyboard some more. In the meantime, all the US-based CNN feeds east of the Mississippi had gone blank and the TV was now displaying a split screen, one from Denver and the other from London.

“Satellite imaging isn't very helpful either,” said Eugene after a few minutes more. “They're just showing a large and still-expanding ring of white that appears to be centered in eastern Massachusetts. All the city lights usually visible from space are out.” He pushed a few buttons and the image on the TV changed to the one on the laptop's monitor. It showed North America and the northern Atlantic Ocean, but covered with a large white ring that looked a little like the front of a wildfire.

“At this rate, that will encircle the globe within the hour,” said Eugene. Everyone was silent. No one suggested switching the image back to the television feed. They all knew there would be no point, for there was no doubt they'd just see the same thing repeated ad nauseum until all signals went dark. Without another word, they all streamed hurriedly out onto the patio and gazed expectantly northward.

At first, they saw nothing out of the ordinary. The moon still shone brightly. The lights from the little settlement of Lago Rosario and several other small dwellings that dotted the lakeshore still pricked out of the not-so-dark as usual and the yellow-ish glow from Trevelin just over the rise to the northwest was there, just like it always was. The first early-autumn snows lay high on the mountain across the valley to the northeast, reflecting the moonlight.

After a good twenty minutes...or maybe it was closer to a half-hour...a stark white glow appeared on the northern horizon over the mountain's western shoulder. It increased until the whole northern sky was filled with a titanium-white blaze of light, sparks and what looked like blue-white electrical arcs.

Rapunzel took a ragged, gasping breath.

“What is it?” asked Eugene, now more concerned than he was already.

Rapunzel pointed at the oncoming light. “That has exactly the same quantum energy signature as the sun-blood!” she shrieked.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure!” she snapped.

“She's right,” said Sophia. The others murmured assent.

The wave of energy bore down upon them before anyone could say more. Eugene felt a stabbing pain in his head. It felt like his brain was at once exploding and imploding. He shut his eyes tightly, but it seemed like the light punched through his eyelids and bored into his skull. He gripped the railing so hard, his hands began to cramp. Then as suddenly as it had come, the light and pain were gone.

Eugene breathed heavily and opened his eyes. The moon still hovered in the sky just where it had been moments before. Otherwise, the valley was darker, the lights from Trevelin, the houses below them and their own behind them had all disappeared.

“ _Ow!_ ” exclaimed Eugene. “That hurt!”

“What?” said Rapunzel.

“You didn't feel a splitting headache?” he said.

Rapunzel shook her head. Eugene looked around at his progeny, all of whom were shaking their heads.

“On the contrary,” she said, “it felt....” Her voice trailed off as she searched for a word.

“Magnificent?” said Frederick, Eugene's third son.

“Orgasmic?” said Sophia.

“You would,” said Sophia's grandson Wolfgang to his grandmother.

“What?” said Eugene. “You mean none of you found that at all...unpleasant?”

Everyone shook their heads.

“Whatever it was,” said Rapunzel, a hint of excitement in her voice, “it fed our sun-blood...a _lot!_ ”

Eugene shook his head. “Just when I thought I'd had you all figured out....” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pushed the power button. Nothing happened. “So much for that idea. I _was_ going to call Jethro or Inga or Hans or Appolonia....” He looked out over the lake. “I guess if we're still alive, then so are they.”

Rapunzel took hold of the railing, tilted her head slightly upward and closed her eyes. “Hold that thought.” She let her mind flit over their house, the valley below them, then out toward the open range and back to Trevelin, its buildings and people. After a few minutes, she spoke. “Everyone in the valley and around the lake and in Trevelin is still alive, but everything electrical...lights, computers, the entire power grid...it's all completely dead,” she said, eyes still closed. “There's no corresponding EM signature anywhere within a twenty-mile radius and from what we saw on TV, I'd imagine it's like this all over the world.” She opened her eyes and looked at her husband, tears welling up. “Anyone anywhere in the world with a pace-maker, or iron lung, or any other electronic life-support will be dead within the hour. And if that...disturbance...went high enough to affect aircraft....” She looked up into the sky and gasped as a loud bang sounded somewhere to the west, followed immediately by the orange glow of a large fire. Another orange glow appeared to the north, in the general vicinity of the Esquel Airport.

Eugene took his wife in his arms as she started to cry. The others engaged in group hugs, too, trying to comfort each other against the realization that millions of people around the world were suddenly dying from abrupt medical equipment failures, plane and automobile crashes and the resulting fires.

After several minutes, Sophia spoke. “I don't know about the rest of you,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek, “but I think I could use that dessert.” Everyone followed her into the house.


	2. Chapter 2

Lake Rosario, Argentina  
22.00 hours, March 17, 2012

The Fitzherberts all sat in the living room, silently staring at their now-empty bowls of fruit cobbler, lost in thought. The warm glow from several kerosene lamps illuminated the room.

“Don't worry, Father,” said Frederick to Eugene, “our people in town and out on the range know how to look after themselves.”

“And it's not like any of us has never been without electricity before,” added Eugene's second daughter Agatha.

“You're right, I know,” said Eugene, “but I'm still a father and it's still my job to worry about you all.”

Rapunzel gave her husband's hand a reassuring squeeze. Eugene smiled. “More than anything, I'm worried about our people in town...well, their families anyway. None of _them_ have gone without power for more than a few days.”

“How do you know this will last?” said Eva. “Maybe the lights will come back on.”

“I don't know about that,” said Wolfgang as he stepped into the room, wiping his hands on a rag. “I took the generator off-line...for all that it wasn't doing a darned thing...but the compressor's acting up. It was putting out a full two hundred PSI this morning, like usual. Now it's not. No matter what I do I can only get twenty PSI, maybe twenty-five if I spike it. That's not really enough to do anything useful, at least not without completely overhauling the design. I went over the troubleshooting checklist twice, triple-checked all the fittings, everything. All thermodynamic indices are right where they should be, we're just not getting more than nominal gas pressure and I have no idea why. Anyway, I went ahead and shut down the compressor, too. Whatever that was, it was more than just an energy surge. I have a very bad feeling about all of this.”

“So, what happens now?” sang Eva softly.

“Don't cry for me, argent tuna,” sang Thorin more strongly.

Everyone groaned.

“I have no idea,” said Eugene.

“But,” said Eva, “you _always_ have a plan...even if it's a bad one.”

“That's because I've always understood the problem...until now.”

“Why is that vibrating?” said Rapunzel, pointing to a mirror sitting on the coffee table.

They all looked at it. Sure enough, it was vibrating a little and emitting a low hum. The frame, made of some oddly-colored metal, was glowing with a faint pinkish hue.

“That's odd,” said Eugene, “it hasn't done that since we last talked to Howl after Sophia was born. He said something about a temporal distortion, but....” He stepped over to it and tapped the frame in a particular way, then stepped back. After a few moments, a candle-lit face not Eugene's appeared in the glass.

“Eugene!” It was Howl Jenkins, their friend from Wales. “I wasn't expecting to hear from you for...well, ever, actually.” He paused, frowning pensively, then visibly shook it off. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your call?”

Eugene raised an eyebrow. “I thought _you_ called _us_.”

Howl furrowed his brow. “No...I've been trying for weeks, but....” His voice dropped off and Eugene had the impression Howl was trying to hide something.

“This mirror started humming...which it hasn't done in a while...so I...tapped on it and here we are.”

“Interesting...” Howl said pensively.

“Interesting how?”

“If you didn't call me and I didn't call you....” His voice trailed off again, then both his eyebrows wet up. “Wait,” he said tentatively, “what year is it...for you?”

“Two thousand twelve,” said Eugene plainly, “March seventeenth to be precise. Why?”

Howl cocked his head. “You didn't learn to navigate the time axis...did you?”

“Um...no,” said Rapunzel flatly.

Howl's eyes grew wide and his jaw dropped. “Guri Dam!” he exclaimed. “He was right!”

“Who was right?” said Rapunzel, furrowing her brow. “And about what?”

“Walter,” said Howl. “If it's twenty-twelve for you and you still look like you're in your twenties, he was right. You're immortal!”

“Tell me something I don't know,” said Eugene.

“What?!” said Rapunzel, growing agitated. “You knew? You knew about this and you didn't _say_ anything?!”

“Walter didn't think you'd take it well and at the time, I agreed.”

“Of course I wouldn't have taken it well!” she shrieked. “But you still should have told me!”

“But we didn't know about Eugene's sun-tears then,” said Howl. “The idea that you'd have to watch him grow old and die....”

“Yes, I know,” interrupted Rapunzel sharply. “We had to see it happen to our children and their children. It was awful!”

Howl sighed. “I...I'm sorry,” he said gravely. “I can only sort of imagine it, what with Aedan and Elsa...yes, we're naming her after you.”

Sophia leaned over next to her mother to join the conversation. “Oh, so you're the Howl about whom my parents keep telling me. It's nice to meet you.”

“This is our daughter Sophia,” said Eugene, “whom you saw the day after she was born.”

Howl's eyebrows went up. “ _No!_ ” he said in astonishment. “It's...hereditary?!”

“Sort of,” said Rapunzel, still a little irritated. “I've passed sun-tears and sun-blood on to all our children, they to theirs, and so forth.”

“That's remarkable!” said Howl.

“This is all well and good,” said Eugene, “but what does any of this have to do with why the mirror works now when it hasn't for the last four centuries?”

“This mirror came from Ingary, right?” said Rapunzel.

“Yes,” said Howl. “The frames are forged of material from the planet's rings. Why?”

“That energy storm had the same quantum signature as the sun-blood.”

“You saw it where you are?”

“Yes,” said Eugene. “We were watching it on CNN and an Internet satellite feed until it passed over us.”

“I don't think it's a coincidence,” said Rapunzel. “But what _was_ it?”

“I don't know...yet,” said Howl. “But we need more information. The first thing we need to know is the scope of the phenomenon.”

“I'm pretty sure it's global,” said Eugene. “The satellite image we last saw showed it covering most of North America and half the Atlantic. The way it was spreading, it would have reached most of the Northern Hemisphere before it reached us.”

“Just where _are_ you?”

“Lake Rosario,” said Rapunzel, “outside of Trevelin.”

“You're in Argentina?”

Leave it to Howl to know about all things Welsh, thought Rapunzel. “It's a long story,” she said.

“I don't doubt it,” said Howl.

“Whatever that was, it's also done something to gas pressure,” said Eugene. “We have a steam-powered air-compressor that should be capable of delivering about three hundred PSI. Now we're lucky to get twenty or so.”

“Did you try...” began Howl.

“We tried everything, believe me,” said Eugene. “Our great-grandson Wolfgang knows at least as much about steam power as anyone alive. If he couldn't get it over twenty-five PSI, no one can.”

“Then it's worse than I thought,” said Howl. “I was about to mirror-call Suliman in New Ingary. Now that I have a little solid information to share, we might be able to get somewhere. I'll call you back in a week or whenever I have something more, whichever comes first.”

Eugene and Rapunzel both nodded and then Howl's image faded. Eugene stood up, his demeanor changing, and he took on the bearing of the King he was. Even before they'd left Corona, Rapunzel always left tactical matters to Eugene and this was no exception. “Alright, people,” he said sternly. “We're now in recon mode. Frederick, Eli, I'd like you to take horses into town and get with our people there. Agatha, I'd like you to take a horse around the lake and talk with people, then return here. Hermann, Karl, Eli, I'd like you to take horses and meet our people out on the range. I know they can take care of themselves, but Rapunzel and I will feel better if they know what's happening. The rest of you, we need to re-take inventory...food, supplies, equipment, etcetera. I had all that in a database on the computer and while I made back-ups, I neglected to make a preliminary hard-copy. Yes, Sophia, you can say you told me so.”

“I told you so,” she said.

Eugene nodded. “So pencil and paper it is. Let's get to it!”


	3. Chapter 3

Lake Rosario, Argentina  
March 22, Change Year 1, 2012 AD

Four days later, Eugene and Rapunzel were once again on the mirror-call with Howl.

“I have good news and bad news,” said Howl. “The good news is that I know what happened. The rest is all bad news, I'm afraid.”

“Continue,” said Rapunzel.

“Earth is out of phase,” continued Howl. “That means...”

“I know what it means,” interrupted Eugene. He'd been studying physics for two decades—partly in an effort to try and understand the sun-tears and sun-blood and partly to keep himself occupied--and held two doctorate degrees in the subject. Rapunzel had tried attending university herself in the 1990's, but she felt very out-of-place after running a country and being older than all of her professors put together. “Sorry, we're still a bit on-edge. Please continue.”

“Earth is out of phase,” repeated Howl, “and while sometimes things will pop back into phase by themselves, I don't think it'll happen this time. Rapunzel, the reason you recognized the energy is that it's from the same supernova that gave you the sun-blood in the first place. When Sophie, Markl and I pushed the portal out over the Atlantic following the evacuation of Ingary, I didn't realize that we also shoved it forward along the time axis.

“The strange thing is how specific the shift is. The margin for error in pushing an entire planet out of phase without ripping it apart, let alone destroying everything on it, is unbelievably narrow, so I don't think it's random. I think someone hijacked the portal and used the energy streaming through it to shift Earth. That could also explain why Calcifer didn't close it as per the plan.”

“Why would someone do such a thing?” said Rapunzel.

“And how?” added Eugene.

“I have no idea,” said Howl. “What I do know, in addition to what you've already shared about electricity and gas pressure is that nothing else requiring rapid energy release works, either. That means explosives, gunpowder, diesel engines, rapid nuclear fission, none of that works anymore. Static electricity seems to still function, but at reduced capacity. The shift is permanent, too. It takes a phenomenal amount of energy to do what's been done, so unless someone has access to another supernova, we're all hosed.”

“Aren't you overreacting just a little?” said Rapunzel.

“Am I? Anyone on any sort of electrical life-support is already dead. Those on prescription medication have until whatever they have runs out to find another way to deal with their conditions, with potentially fatal consequences. Those deaths, plus all those from vehicle crashes and their aftermath, have already numbered in the tens of millions. The world was already nine meals away from a riot. Now those nine meals have passed and a lot of people have run out of food. In some places, like the Kalahari or the Amazon, people won't really notice. New Ingary was just bringing some rudimentary steam-powered industry online, so I don't think it'll be hard for them to readjust to the old technology they've been using since their arrival, especially since Ingary was really just beginning its own industrial revolution when it was destroyed. For the rest of us, particularly those in the so-called industrialized countries...it's going to get bad...very bad.”

“Do you have a plan?” said Eugene.

“We're leaving,” said Howl.

“Leaving?” said Rapunzel. “Didn't you do that just a few years ago?”

“Yes...we did. The Ingarians here aren't happy about it and I can't say I blame them. But they understand that their survival is at stake. We're looking at what amounts to a global refugee situation and no one understands that better than Ingarians.”

“You're going to New Ingary...aren't you?” said Rapunzel.

“No...at least, not right away. The portals are unstable right now. Suliman and I will be working on that as soon as the dust settles, but it could be a while. We're heading to the coast with the help of my seven-league boots. Once there, we'll board my sail-yacht. Markl and Penelope are still in Wyoming and they're going to stay put. They're fine for now, but they may want some help at some point. We might head toward them, but that's still undecided. I'm not sure where we'd land anyway...somewhere on the Gulf coast, most likely. But we have a few months of ocean travel ahead of us and a lot can happen during that time, so we'll probably have to play a lot of things by ear. What about you? What are your plans?”

“Most of us will have to leave, too,” said Eugene. “We like it here, but there's no way the land can support a whole family of firewalkers.”

“We have...had...” continued Rapunzel, “...employees to farm the land by machine. I don't think we have the resources to re-train them _and_ re-build the tools necessary to work the land the low-tech way while still feeding ourselves. Nobody knows more than we do about doing things using pre-industrial methods, but....” Her voice trailed off.

“Most people don't know it yet,” said Howl, “but you're in serious demand. You could all help a whole lot of people.”

“So could you.”

“You know as well as I that by the time I convince the British Parliament of the truth, it'll be too late...if it isn't already.”

Rapunzel rolled her eyes. “Tell me about it. Those people were recalcitrant even in the seventeenth century. A few of us are staying behind, so it's not like we're abandoning the people here in their hour of need. It's just that...do you remember how much I ate when I was visiting you before our wedding?”

Howl nodded.

“We _all_ eat like that! That's why we have to leave. We firewalkers don't have the luxury of making do with a low-calorie diet...at least, not for long. Our metabolisms are just too fast! It wouldn't be fair to make everyone here eat less than a thousand calories a day while they watch us continue to stuff ourselves.”

“It barely worked in Corona,” added Eugene, “and that was only because there were a dozen of us and we're Royals! Now we're nearly thirty strong and no one really knows us from Adam and Eve. We'll use our standard relocation plan, but we're not sure where to go.”

“You could go to Wyoming,” offered Howl. “You'll probably have to go somewhere else from there, but you can make that decision later. In the meantime, I'm sure Markl and Penelope wouldn't mind your company...and your protection.”

“Well...” said Eugene, “...it would give us purpose again.”

“I don't think you have any idea how much we need that,” added Rapunzel.

“Keep in mind,” continued Eugene, “that it's autumn here. Going anywhere during winter wouldn't be a good idea, especially for us. Some of our offspring are bringing the llama herds in from the range for the winter. We have a couple of others who've married locals over in Trevelin and they'll be staying. We have the rest of autumn and all winter to refine the plan. The rest of us will be ready to head out as soon as winter breaks.”

“What about what you said about food? Will the land support you while you're on the move?”

“That's why we'll have to break up and rendezvous at a specified location,” said Eugene.

“Then it sounds like we have our plans,” said Howl. “I'll contact you again once we've set sail. I don't suppose I have to remind you to be careful.”

“No,” said Eugene, “you don't. From what you say, there are going to be an awful lot of desperate people out there and believe me, we've seen more than our share of the stupid things desperate people tend to do.”

“Right you are,” said Howl. “Until later, then.” His image faded.


End file.
